Events
Past Event
WED@NICO WEBINAR: Noah Askin, INSEAD
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
Details
Speaker:
Noah Askin, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour, INSEAD
Title:
Two Pathways to Creativity: How Collaboration Leads to Novelty in Popular Music
Abstract:
All cultural production starts with creativity. And despite the popular myth of the lone creative genius, it is well understood that creativity is a collaborative endeavor. Most research in sociology—particularly in the social network tradition—focuses on the structural dimension of collaboration, proposing that access to diverse collaborators unlocks creative production through exposure to diverse ideas and influences. Building on work in social psychology that examines the role of contextual factors in facilitating (or inhibiting) creativity, we argue that collaboration can foster creativity via a second path: via exposure to creative alters who provide inspiration and support during the creative process. Leveraging original data on over 25,000 musicians and 600,000 songs, we construct a feature-based measure of creative output (i.e., song novelty) and then estimate how artists’ collaboration networks affect their propensity to produce novel work—via access to diverse ideas or exposure to creative alters. Findings provide evidence of the two pathways to creativity and suggest that they interact in counter-intuitive ways. Better accounting for the sources of creative influence generates new insights into the production of novelty in music and the social organization of creativity itself.
Speaker Bio:
Noah Askin is an Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD in Fontainebleau. His research interests include social and cultural networks, the drivers and consequences of creativity and innovation (particularly in the music industry), the production and consumption of culture, and the dynamics of organisational and individual status. His research is divided among these interests in two streams. The first is around the creation and performance of cultural products: music chart and industry dynamics, the factors that contribute to creativity (especially the role played by diversity of one’s connections), the tradeoffs associated with being innovative, the implications of the shift to digital distribution, and the analysis of culture using big data. The second area of research is around the role and impact of network- and rankings-based status on organisations. His work, which has garnered him recognition on the Thinkers 50 Radar list, has appeared in Administrative Science Quarterly, American Sociological Review, computational social science publications, and been covered in the press by Rolling Stone, The Economist, Forbes, Business Insider, Quartz.com, The Times of London, M Magazine, the New York Post, and music industry blogs.
Webinar:
Webinar link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/96945660289
Passcode: nico
ID: 969 4566 0289
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Lightning Talks w/ Northwestern Scholars!
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speakers:
Yessica Herrera, Visiting Scholar, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: The Body Speaks: Visual Patterns of Psychological Stress
Aakriti Kumar, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems
Talk Title: Evaluating Elements of Empathic Communication with Experts, Crowds, and Large Language Models
Tingyu "Mark" Zhao, PhD Student, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
Talk Title: Noise Filtering in Complex Networks
Sign Up:
Sign up to present at a future Lightning Talk session. NICO Lightning Talks are open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95387714084
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 14, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
WED@NICO SEMINAR: Rosemary Braun, Northwestern University "The Scale of Life"
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
12:00 PM
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Lower Level, Chambers Hall
Details
Speaker:
Rosemary Braun, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular Biosciences, Northwestern University
Title:
The Scale of Life
Abstract:
Living systems exhibit surprising and beautiful self-organization at all scales. At the atomic level, proteins self-assemble into macromolecular complexes. The function of these machines is orchestrated within the cell by regulatory networks, whose activity is in turn dictated by, and coordinated with, the cells environment. This coordination takes place across large spans of space and time: the size and lifetime of organisms as large as the blue whale. Populations and ecosystems of many organisms in turn exhibit remarkable emergent dynamics. Today, advances in single-cell assays enable us to probe the molecular state of every cell in a sample in high-dimensional detail. But is this the correct scale at which to probe living systems? What can we learn from this data, and how can we abstract from the microscopic details to macroscopic phenotypes? In this talk, I will discuss some of our recent work bridging the cell and tissue/organism scales, and discuss some challenges and opportunities for the future.
Speaker Bio:
Rosemary Braun is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences, Applied Mathematics [ESAM], and Physics at Northwestern University. A theoretical physicist by training, she earned her PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois, followed by a Masters in Biostatistics from Johns Hopkins University. She completed her postdoctoral training at the National Cancer Institute (NIH) before joining Northwestern as a faculty member. Today, she works at the intersection of statistics, mathematics, and biology to develop computational tools for analyzing high-dimensional data. In addition to her Northwestern affiliations, she is also Associate Director of the National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, as well as external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute.
Location:
In person: Chambers Hall, 600 Foster Street, Lower Level
Remote option: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/97015976754
Passcode: NICO25
About the Speaker Series:
Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems, data science and network science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.
Time
Wednesday, May 21, 2025 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
Lower Level, Chambers Hall Map
Contact
Calendar
Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)